Adding audio, etc.

Here's what happened at the end of last week:

Thursday, I met with Roxanne and showed her the slides with questions on them that weren't "question slides" (meaning their results can't be reported) in the Research vs. Review Articles module. Roxanne confirmed that being able to have students' answers reported to her is important, so we decided that in this module and the Scholarly vs. Popular Articles module, each question would have 2 slides: one instructing the student to follow a link to the article's database record (allowing the link to open in a new window and not disrupting the module), and the second would have the citation and the question on it. We decided that the final slide of each module should include CC licensing information, but not Roxanne's contact information. We also decided that students should not have the opportunity to go back on question slides- even when they are allowed to go back, they cannot change their answers, so there is little benefit to their being able to do so and plenty of opportunity for confusion. Other details that we noticed needed changing upon looking at the modules included:

• PubMed: When you click on the link to PubMed, the module continues running. Putting in a "Continue" button for students to push when they return to the module will fix this.
• Boolean: There is some flashing in the middle of the Camtasia portion that should be fixed. Instead of trying to link to the database AFSA in every question, put a slide before the questions (with a link) saying that they may wish to refer to ASFA's thesaurus for controlled vocabulary.
  

After meeting with Roxanne, I spent the rest of the day finishing the Keywords & Controlled Vocabulary module (which, you may recall, had to be re-done because of a corrupted Camtasia file) and making changes to other modules we had discussed. To be sure students' answers to questions would be sent to Roxanne, I went to the Quiz Preferences in each module, enabled reporting, and chose email as the method of reporting, putting my email address in for testing purposes.

On Friday, I met with Loriene and showed her the modules. She pointed out that I should consider accessibility issues (having closed captions on the audio will go part way towards satisfying those concerns). She also suggested that we submit the tutorial to PRIMO, ACRL's database of peer-reviewed instructional materials online.

For the rest of the day, I fixed the questions in the Scholarly vs Popular Articles and Research vs Review Articles modules, and added audio to all modules. Per Matt's suggestion, I added the audio in Captivate. This worked well, for the most part, because Captivate creates a preview that runs while you're recording the audio to ensure that the two are synchronized. Unfortunately, this preview does not include playing the imported Flash from Camtasia, so I had to open these videos in another screen and play them while recording the audio.

Links in question slides

I was able to make the changes Roxanne and I discussed yesterday without any problems with one exception - I have not yet fixed the links on question slides in the scholarly vs. popular and research vs. review modules. Just to remind you, I couldn't put links directly into question slides (Captivate doesn't let you), so these links were actually published animations from separate Captivate files. Basically, for each link, I have a separate small Captivate file that just consists of one slide with one small, transparent button on it - when you click the button it takes you to the appropriate URL. So I went back to each of these files and changed them so that when you click on the button it takes you to the appropriate URL in a new window. The first time I made the change, I previewed the project to confirm that it did open up the link in a new window. I published each project after I made the change (I had already deleted the previous published version so that I wouldn't be confused by having 2 different versions in my files.) So then I went back to each question slide with a link, deleted the existing animation that served as a link and imported the new published file as an animation. When I then previewed the whole project, these links still came up in the same browser window! I talked to Matt about this and he said that the browser settings wouldn't have been imported with the animation. His suggestion about how to work around this problem was to create slides that look like question slides but aren't (we wouldn't be able to have the responses to these questions sent to Roxanne in any way) - I'll give this a try tomorrow.

In the meantime, as I was putting the other modules together, I went back to each Camtasia recording and read through the script while watching it, cutting short segments and adding frames as necessary. I also moved the powerpoint slides directly to Captivate so that only the full-motion screen-capture portions are still in Camtasia. This means that it will be easier to edit the timing for each slide (making it longer or shorter) from within Captivate instead of having to edit it in Camtasia, publish it, and reimport it into Captivate any time there needs to be a change. I think it also improved the clarity of these slides.

Combining elements from Camtasia and Captivate

On Monday and Tuesday I worked on combining the video elements of each module created in Camtasia with the exercises created in Captivate. On Friday I had tried publishing the Camtasia elements as flash videos (FLV files) and importing them into Captivate slides, but as far as I could tell, it wasn't working (only a gray box showed up in on the slide, and nothing happened when I previewed the project). Once I talked to Matt, though, I found out that this was the correct method, and my problem was simply the fact that the video only shows when you preview the project in a website. Some other problems/issues that came up as I was putting the modules together were:

• Links - the default is that they open in the same browser window as your project, so you have to use the back button to return to the tutorial (which then starts from the beginning). When you create an action that links to an outside website, you can specify that you want it to open in a new browser window - I've been going back and changing the links to be sure that they do so.
• Flash skins - when you import a flash video into Captivate, the default settings create a skin with separate pause/play/volume buttons for the video and pause the Captivate presentation while it is played. Having two sets of control buttons is certainly not visually appealing. It can also be confusing because there are forward and back buttons in the Captivate viewer which only move forward and back through the Captivate slides and don't work if you try to fast forward or rewind while you're watching imported flash video. As a solution to this problem, I've started using the following procedure: make the Captivate slide as long as the imported video, have no skin on the video, and don't pause the Captivate slide while the video is playing. Then there is only one set of controls and they work for the whole project.
• Timing - There's still a lot to do with regards to getting the timing of everything right. I did some edits to the "answers" in the scholarly vs. popular and research vs. review modules. The default slide length is 3s - I read the content of these slides aloud to determine how long they would take to read and adjusted the length accordingly (to around 10-15s).
  

I was able to create combined videos for 5 of the 6 modules (the Camtasia portion of keywords & controlled vocabularies was corrupted in some way and will have to be redone) and show them to Roxanne on Tuesday. Here are the changes I'll be making based on that meeting:

• Overall:
  
• Add a slide at the end of each module that says "the end" or something like it
  
• We decided that we didn't need to have much library branding throughout the tutorial since it will be found on the library website. I'll take the intro slide used in the Catalog vs. databases module and use it in the other modules.
  
• Scholarly vs. Popular:
  
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• In the "answer" for the article from Nature, take out the comment about Nature being one of the most well-known journals.
• In one question slide, italicize Economist.
• In the "answer" with graphs - take a new screen shot of only one graph and make the caption larger.
• Roxanne will send the correct citation format for the wikipedia article "Colony collapse disorder" and I'll put it on the question slide.
• Research vs. Review:
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• On all of the question slides change the text that says "(Click here for abstract.)" to "View this link, then answer the question below." This is to clarify that they have to view the database record with the abstract in order to answer the question.
• Boolean operators and search strategies
• Look into improving the video quality
• In the drag-and-drop exercise bold or highlight the connector and change the text for AND and NOT: "Please move only those animals that lay eggs AND fly."
• Change the length of the "answer" slides to around 10s each
• Catalog vs. databases
• The link to another tutorial does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Italicize the title in question 5
• Take out the "Question _ of _" text on each question slide
• PubMed
• The link to PubMed does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Use the mouse to hit "search" instead of using the keyboard to enter in the MeSH search
• Solve problem in going between Camtasia and Captivate portions of this module

I'll be making these changes and sharing the updated modules with Roxanne in webspace by this evening. Then I'll be working on adding audio to the modules.

Work done Friday and questions for next week

On Friday, I did a variety of different things:

• I finished making the edits that Roxanne suggested in our Thursday meeting and created a new video for the catalog vs. database module.
  

• I tried to import flash files produced from Camtasia into Captivate, to no avail. When you produce your project in Camtasia, one of the options is to create a flash file (the default is a SWF file, but FLV is also possible). You can then insert flash into Captivate slides (FLV). Even so, I couldn't get my Camtasia videos to work within Captivate. This is something I'll be asking Matt about on Monday.

• I created interactive slides for the keywords and controlled vocabulary module. This is where students are asked to create a hierarchy, given a list of terms. I still have to decide exactly which way to present each question:
• Format #1 - as fill-in-the-blank question slides
• Here, the input is handled in the same manner as it is for all other question slides.
• Visually, it's not as appealing because you can't completely hide the fill-in-the-blank phrase (it appears as a miscellaneous "<" on the screen), and you can only have up to 8 blanks
• Format #2 - as a blank slide with each text-entry box inserted separately
• This creates a submit button for each box (which you can hide) - I'm not sure if the reporting is equivalent to that for question slides. This is something to ask Matt about.
• It's more visually appealing and you can add as many text boxes as fit on the screen.

So the main things I need to do next week are add audio and integrate Camtasia and Captivate portions for each module.

Camtasia versions

Thursday was a day for dealing with more technical difficulties. In trying to show Roxanne one of my Camtasia files earlier in the week, I got an error message saying that I couldn't open the file because it was created in a newer version of Camtasia. In other words, files that I created at the iSchool's IT lab (using Camtasia 6.0.1) wouldn't open at TIS (where they have Camtasia 5.0) - this was true for 4 out the 6 modules. I assumed that I would be able to go back to the IT lab and save these files in an older version, but there is not separate file type to distinguish between versions. It's vital that I be able to work with Camtasia files outside of the IT lab because as of Friday the lab is closed until August 18th. I asked folks at the IT lab and searched on Tech Smith's (the company that makes Camtasia) website and other help pages and couldn't find any information on how to enable this kind of backwards compatibility between software versions. I thought about downloading a trial version of Camtasia (which is fully functional and lasts for 30 days) onto my laptop, but it is only available for Windows and I have a Mac. I thought about buying Windows at the campus computer store (where it's cheap) and downloading a Windows emulator so that I could run it on my Mac. Before doing so, I stopped back by TIS to check the error message one last time. I did a search for the exact text of the error message, and finally found a solution! (In case you're curious, here's where I found it: http://forums.techsmith.com/archive/index.php/t-3476.html) That worked for 2 of my 4 modules that were made in Camtasia 6. Throughout my search process I also realized that the actual screen-recordings were one file type (.camrec) that was usable across versions, while the projects where I combined and edited these recordings were a different file type (.camproj). The camproj files were the ones that I couldn't open in Camtasia 5.0, but it proved not too difficult to re-import the camrec files and redo some editing.

So, basically, I got it all worked out in the end. This problem with backwards compatibility of Camtasia versions is something that folks should certainly take into consideration when they're thinking about buying the program, though.

Struggles with Flash

On Wednesday I gave Flash a try in order to create a diagram into which students could drag and drop items to demonstrate how Boolean operators work. Since I didn't have any previous experience with Flash, this was somewhat challenging. I was using Adobe Flash Professional, which has a largely graphic interface. Various instructions I found through software help sites involved entering some simple code, but I had a hard time figuring out where I could enter such code (as it turned out, this involved editing "actions" associated with a movie clip or button). Once I got that figured out, I kept creating files where you could move the whole graphic around, but not specific elements (the samples I found converted graphics to movie clips and then created a button within each movie clip - but I couldn't figure out to make a button within a movie clip). Basically, I struggled for a long time with understanding how to use the software and looking through help manuals, but eventually I got it to work!

Implementation, Part 3

A little more background...
Roxanne will be drafting the audio script for the modules, so my next step was to draft the video segments to give her an idea of how long they would be and allow her the opportunity to suggest changes. To do so, I took the powerpoint slides Roxanne had made (2-5 slides of content for each module), added some slides, and took screen-recordings of demonstration elements in the library catalog and various databases. I edited these screen-recordings in Camtasia, making use of its zoom-and-pan and call-out capabilities. Each module is meant to be ten minutes at the most, and at least half of that time is devoted to the active learning exercises. Consequently, the screen-recordings are relatively short - typically between 2 and 4 minutes. As an example, here's my draft of the scholarly vs. popular articles module: